AQ Khan gave nuclear tech to India: US arms expert

WASHINGTON: A US arms control expert has made the astonishing claim that Pakistan's notorious nuclear engineer A Q Khan may have passed on nuclear technology to India.

The source of the article is as surprising as the claim is fantastic. In a commentary in Playboy, Joshua Pollack, a US policy wonk who has worked on nuclear proliferation, says India may have been the secret, unnamed "fourth country" - after Iran, Libya and North Korea - to which AQ Khan "provided the shortcut to a nuclear weapon".

Pollack offers little credible evidence to back the contention, other than to point similarities between the centrifuges India uses in its uranium-enrichment program and Pakistan's centrifuges engineered by Khan. He also cites South African court documents claiming a member of the 'Khan network' supplied India's centrifuge program with specialized equipment, starting in the late 1980s.

According to Pollack, although India went nuclear several years before Pakistan, it was through the plutonium route (in 1972). India could break ground on its uranium enrichment facility only in 1986, by which time Pakistan was churning out weapons-grade uranium for three years.

'India's N-centrifuge design came from A Q Khan'

A US arms control expert has claimed that Pakistan's notorious nuclear scientist A Q Khan may have passed on nuclear technology to India, citing newspaper ads in 2006 requisitioning centrifuge parts.

"India's enrichment program progressed slowly... In 2006 the Washington DC-based Institute for Science and International Security revealed that the Indian government had used newspaper ads to solicit bids for centrifuge parts. The details of these advertisements, along with documents Indians gave potential suppliers, provide strong clues about where New Delhi's supercritical centrifuge technology came from," Joshua Pollack said in a commentary in Playboy. "Despite some changes, the design is recognizable to the trained eye: It almost mirrors the G-2 centrifuge, a design Khan stole from URENCO in the 1970s and reproduced as Pakistan's P-2 centrifuge."

Pollack also says an engineering firm belonging to Gerhard Wisser, a German in South Africa, in collaboration with Gotthard Lerch in Switzerland, supplied specialized equipment to both Pakistan and its proliferation partners, and starting in the late 1980s, to India too.

"Could Khan have been ignorant about Wisser's dealings with India? His own guilty conscience says otherwise," Pollack conjectures, writing that though Khan has never acknowledged having a fourth customer, he gave his Pakistani interrogators at least two contradictory cover stories that may explain how Pakistan's enrichment technology could have ended up in "enemy hands".

At first, Khan seems to have suggested his overseas network (Lerch, Wisser et al) was autonomous enough to supply both India and Pakistan. But Khan later alleged he had been exploited by an Indian connection who was hidden inside Farooq's Dubai operation. "Ironically," he cites Musharraf's biography, "the network based in Dubai had employed several Indians, some of whom have since vanished."

The idea that Khan would have wilfully sneaked knowhow to India is far-fetched, considering he had a pathological hatred of the country of his origin (he migrated to Pakistan from Bhopal). Both Musharraf and Khan have been repeatedly exposed as bare-faced liars, but Pakistani nationalists, in a bid to obfuscate the proliferation charge against Islamabad, have long alleged that India too has been a beneficiary of nuclear smuggling rings.